This Week In Quotes: Jan 24 – Jan 30

President Obama meets every definition of an imperial presidency. He is the president that Richard Nixon always wanted to be. — Johnathan Turley

When President Bush was president we treated him with great respect. We disagreed with him in the War in Iraq. We disagreed with him in Social Security… But, as I said, we respected President Bush. — Nancy Pelosi

That’s MSNBC. Many progressive reporters would like to think of themselves as somewhat elevated. MSNBC will not allow them that. MSNBC will give them no place to hide. MSNBC will allow them no cover, not even an inch of it.

In a way, MSNBC is conservatives’ best friend: We attempt to puncture the smug illusions that progressive media types have about themselves, but only MSNBC is really doing so.

And so MSNBC tells progressive reporters: This is what you really are. This is not what you wish to be, or what you pretend to be; this is what you really are, down deep, past the veneer of pretense and posturing. In your gut, you’re just low, crude, unthinking partisan animals.

It turns out that for all their diversity, the strikingly successful groups in America today share three traits that, together, propel success. The first is a superiority complex – a deep-seated belief in their exceptionality. The second appears to be the opposite – insecurity, a feeling that you or what you’ve done is not good enough. The third is impulse control.

….The United States itself was born a Triple Package nation, with an outsize belief in its own exceptionality, a goading desire to prove itself to aristocratic Europe (Thomas Jefferson sent a giant moose carcass to Paris to prove that America’s animals were bigger than Europe’s) and a Puritan inheritance of impulse control. — Amy Chua And Jed Rubenfeld

My biggest, you know, regret is what happened in Benghazi. It was a terrible tragedy, losing four Americans two diplomats and now it’s public, so I can say two CIA operatives. — Hillary Clinton

Let me tell you something that is deeply concerning–the abuse of power from this Administration. We’ve seen multiple filmmakers prosecuted and the government’s gone after them. Whether it’s the poor fellow that did the film that the President blamed Benghazi and the terrorist attacks on, turns out that wasn’t the reason for the attack but the Administration went and put that poor fellow in jail on unrelated charges. Just this week it was broken that Dinesh D’Souza, who did a very big movie criticizing the president, is now being prosecuted by this Administration. Can you image the reaction if the Bush Administration had went, gone and prosecuted Michael Moore and Alec Baldwin and Sean Penn? It should trouble everyone the government uses government power and the IRS in particular to target their enemies… — Ted Cruz

As Montesquieu knew, an imperial presidency threatens the liberty of every citizen. Because when a president can pick and choose which laws to follow and which to ignore, he is no longer a president. — Ted Cruz

Of all the troubling aspects of the Obama presidency, none is more dangerous than the president’s persistent pattern of lawlessness, his willingness to disregard the written law and instead enforce his own policies via executive fiat. — Ted Cruz

Rule of law doesn’t simply mean that society has laws; dictatorships are often characterized by an abundance of laws. Rather, rule of law means that we are a nation ruled by laws, not men. That no one–and especially not the president–is above the law. For that reason, the U.S. Constitution imposes on every president the express duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

Yet rather than honor this duty, President Obama has openly defied it by repeatedly suspending, delaying and waiving portions of the laws he is charged to enforce. When Mr. Obama disagreed with federal immigration laws, he instructed the Justice Department to cease enforcing the laws. He did the same thing with federal welfare law, drug laws and the federal Defense of Marriage Act. — Ted Cruz

In the more than two centuries of our nation’s history, there is simply no precedent for the White House wantonly ignoring federal law and asking private companies to do the same. — Ted Cruz

Republicans are poised for an historic election this fall–a conservative tidal wave much like 2010. The biggest thing we could do to mess that up would be if the House passed an amnesty bill–or any bill perceived as an amnesty bill–that demoralized voters going into November. Rather than responding to the big-money lobbying on K Street, we need to make sure working-class Americans show up by the millions to reject Obamacare and vote out the Democrats. Amnesty will ensure they stay home. — Ted Cruz

Again, I’m not alleging cynicism: Social liberals are entirely sincere in their belief that even self-censorship is unnecessary censorship (or, perhaps, that the internet has rendered cultural standards obsolete); in their conviction that laws banning abortion or restricting divorce are too punitive, illiberal and inherent sexist to be just; in their abiding sense that economic paternalism is morally acceptable but social-moral-sexual paternalism is not. But it is still the case that when we legalized abortion and instituted unilateral divorce, we helped usher in a sexual-marital-parental culture that seems to work roughly as well for people with lots of social capital as it did sixty years ago, while working pretty badly for the poor and lower middle class. It is still a reality of contemporary life that when anyone can get a divorce for any reason, the lower classes seem to get far more of the divorces, and that when anyone can get an abortion for any reason, the poor end up having more abortions and more children out of wedlock both. And it is still a fact that if you tallied up winners and losers from the sexual revolution, the obvious winners would tend to cluster at one end of 1975’s income distribution, the obvious losers at the other. — Ross Douthat

He seems to work very hard on the politics of immigration but not the actual policy of it. There’s a real belief within a lot of Republicans that whatever we pass he’s not going to enforce. He made that clear even with statements tonight that he’ll go around Congress to do this. There’s this sense of what if we pass stronger enforcement, everyone agreed to it and the president just ignored it? He seems to have that pattern. — Rep. James Lankford (R-OK)

We need more answers there, we need answers about a lot of things. This administration promised to be the most transparent in history, Rachel, and I think if you would stop being a cheerleader and be a journalist, you’d recognize we’re not getting those answers. — GOP Rep. Tim Huelskamp to Rachel Maddow

The issue has been the inability of my message to penetrate the Republican base so that they feel persuaded that I’m not the caricature that you see on Fox News or Rush Limbaugh, but I’m somebody who is interested in solving problems and is pretty practical, and that, actually, a lot of the things that we’ve put in place worked better than people might think. — Barack Obama

This whole sort of ‘war on women’ sort of thing, I’m scratching my head because if there was a war on women, I think they won. – Rand Paul

You know, the Democrats one of their big issues they’ve concocted is saying Republicans are committing a ‘War on Women.’ One of the workplace laws and rules that I think are good is that bosses shouldn’t prey on young interns in their office. I think the media really have given President Clinton a pass on this. He took advantage of a girl that was 20 years-old and an intern in his office. There is no excuse for that. — Rand Paul

The right is preoccupied with fighting evil and the left is preoccupied with fighting those who fight evil. — Dennis Prager

When I was young, my father used to tell me about tactics of Leftists he dealt with in academia. He had a favorite saying, “They would step on you and then claim that you had kicked the bottom of their shoes”, he said. — Weasel Zippers

MSNBC, on whose shows I have happily participated* (see update below), engages daily in the othering business, of making conservatism itself (and sometimes libertarianism, and other non-Progressive ideological strains) a disreputable condition, explicable in terms of pathology. That this is done in the name of tolerance and sensitivity to punitive stereotypes is one of the ironies of our age. — Matt Welch

Is she going to run? Fish gotta swim. Birds gotta fly and Clintons have to run for office. It’s what they do. It’s a metabolic urge. All they’ve done in their adult life is borrow money from rich people to seek public office. — George Will